Cutting the Grass

(E was 32 months old.)

You’ll need:

Scissors.

We’ve recently moved into a house that no one had lived in for a year, and I’m honestly not sure how much gardening went on before that.

It’s the first house my husband and I have lived in as adults, and while we’re not the greatest gardeners, we do like to attempt to make things look tidy {and I definitely have plans of growing veggies with E once the temps go down a bit}.

After the first time my husband mowed the lawn, there was high grass at the edges that the lawnmower hadn’t reached and needed to be cut by hand.

We both thought that E would get a kick out of helping with it, and on an uncharacteristically cool morning, E and I set out to do some gardening.

When E heard that we were gonna be cutting the grass, she immediately went in search of her {paper} scissors. I was actually up for letting her try the big shears but she was perfectly happy with her little scissors.

{She uses regular small scissors and always has since she started cutting at 2 years old. While we haven’t tried with anything else, I’d expect that anything that’ll cut paper will cut most grasses.}

She was really excited about this simple {and useful!} activity.

I love this picture of her proudly showing off a tuft of grass she’d cut.

More grass…

to put on the quickly growing pile of cuttings.

When she didn’t feel like cutting the grass anymore, she went ahead and made her own fun.

She started out picking up pine cones with her scissors

then switched to small rocks from different areas of the yard that she deposited in other areas.

And of course she helped me bag the cuttings and put them in the trashcan when all the grass was cut.

To round out our time spent enjoying our front lawn, we had a picnic when all the hard work was done.

We simply put a towel in the middle of the lawn and had a wonderful snack of grapes and yogurt.

I have no idea what the neighbors thought but I don’t care – E loved it, and that’s what counts 🙂

What I learned:

This was some really fun scissor practice that’s actually both useful and interesting to a toddler.

I didn’t know that you can {or would want to} use scissors like tongs to transport natural items across the yard 😉 But yay for E making up her own fun hand strengthening exercise 😉

Additional suggestions:

If you don’t trust your child with scissors or can’t supervise closely enough while actually getting some work done, find some other way to involve him/her. A toddler could bag cuttings as you go, find the next area for you to work on, or maybe simply dig around in an unused flower bed or even a sensory box with soil and fake or real flowers.

If you don’t have a lawn or it doesn’t need to be cut by hand, you can grow some grass in a pot or box and let your toddler cut away. {This also eliminates the risk of losing plants that weren’t supposed to be cut.}

Have you tried cutting the grass with your child? What does your child like to cut? Leave a comment!

If you like this post, click here to subscribe to my newsletter and receive an email once a week when new posts are published, or to my RSS feed.

Also make sure to follow me on Pinterest to stay up to date with all we do, and for lots of great ideas from others!

If you prefer Facebook, I’d love to connect with you there: Like and drop me a line on my Facebook page, where I share my own posts and those of others every day!